The Diverging Cultures of The New England and Chesapeake Colonies

The diverging cultures of the colonies of Chesapeake and New England Mang of the proponents of English colonization in North America never crossed the Atlantic, but they wrote about the wealth the English would discover there. These proponents of colonization intended to promote Protestantism while making money whether via the importation of raw materials or the creation of new markets for English products. But the English migrants who really traveled bad other objectives. English settlers in the Chesapeake Bay region founded Virginia and Maryland with a distinctly commercial focus. Despite their hopes for gold, the early Virginians in Jamestown soon realized that growing tobacco was the only reliable source of income, as did the immigrants in Maryland. The tobacco fields of these two colonies were the dream of thousands of goung Englishmen, single and jobless and impatient with a few Englishwomen, who hoped for a better life. Driven by religious reasons, a totally distinct class of English men and women migrated to the stong terrain and bitter weather of New England. Families with goung children made up a large portion of the Puritans who traveled across the Atlantic. They were often migrating "begond the seas with their preachers, imagining a new English Israel where reformed Protestantism would flourish and serve as a counterbalance to the Catholic threat and an example for the rest of the Christian world. The English in New England developed communities centered on the church, where each congregation made decisions that were best for itself, whereas the English in Virginia and Maryland pushed te extend their lucrative tobacco farms. The American Puritan movement gave birth to the Congregational Church. Mang historians believe that the stark contrasts between the colonies of New England and the Chesapeake led to the fault lines that eventually divided the United States into its North and South. The internal issues facing England were the root cause of such disparities. The English state church, the Church of England, which was founded in the 1530s, began to require more and more adherence to its customs in the early 1600s, although Puritans pressed for more extensive changes. Due to their resistance to the Church of England's authority, prominent Puritan clergymen and their adberents were seen as criminals and a danger to national security by the 16205. Many Puritans made the decision to relocate to New England as the conformity-induced noose tightened around them. The population of New England was twenty-five thousand by 1640, In the meanwhile, a large number of devoted Church of England adherents, who both domestically and in New England derided and despised Puritans, migrated to Virginia in search of economic opportunities. As a civil war came out in the 16405, pitting Parliamentarians-the Puritan reformers and their allies in Parliament-against Royalist followers of King Charles I and the Church of England, the difficulties in England worsened. With the upper hand in 1649, the Parliamentarians executed Charles I in a way never seen before. As a result, England became a republic-a state without a monarch in the 1650s. American English colonists kept a keen eye on these developments. To be sure, a large number of Puntans departed New England and went back home to fight against the loing and the national church. Across the English Atlantic World and in the Chesapeake colonies, other English men and women watched with dismag as the Parliamentarians, under the leadership of the Puritan rebels, seemed to be wreaking havoc across England. Due to the unrest in England, it wes difficult to oversee and manage the colonies in New England and the Chesapeake, and the cultures of the two areas diverged